This is so helarious, to see all the Nvidiots either absent in the discussion (BKswany) or now completely changing their opinion just makes me laugh. Now the question is how will this impact the FX sales and ATI's if they were indeed cheating. Now that ATI is being accused its going to affect everyone and we should all come together instead of bickering about who's is faster etc. Hopefully now the consumers can get some vindication.

A very well-written document, which answered every single point that people have made in nVidia's defence.

I guess you could call this a 'smoking gun'.

I'll be interested to see what comes out of the ATi cheat allegation as well - I found that part a little confusing, as the document seemed to contradict itself:

Quote:

NVIDIA’s certain products had a performance drop of as much as
24.1% while competition’s products performance drop stayed within the margin of error of 3%.

Quote:

Our investigations reveal that some drivers from ATI also produce a slightly lower total score on
this new build of 3DMark03. The drop in performance on the same test system with a Radeon
9800 Pro using the Catalyst 3.4 drivers is 1.9%. This performance drop is almost entirely due to
8.2% difference in the game test 4 result, which means that the test was also detected and
somehow altered by the ATI drivers. We are currently investigating this further.

Not to deny that ATi are cheating (that seems pretty much clear-cut), but those two statements I just quoted seem to go against one another.

And to all the people saying that this proves how useless synthetic benchmarks are, I suggest you read the FutureMark 'audit' document a little more thoroughly and digest the points made within it.

Originally posted by Morrow After officially knowing now that both nvidia and ATI cheat in 3dmark03 (anyone surprised?), what do we learn from this incident?

We learn of course that we can no longer trust synthetic benchmarks, isn't it obvious?

No obvious at all.

It's obvious that if the make of the synthetic benchmark doesn't actively persue cheaters and take measures to combat it, THEN we could no longer trust it.

What we have learned from this incident, is that FutureMark will NOT TOLERATE cheating. They will expose it, no matter who does it. It does exactly the opposite of what you are saying. This make 3DMark all the more trustworthy, because they will actively take measures against cheating.

Quote:

Cheating in games is certainly easier to hide but not as easy to implement because the cheats found in 3dmark03 do not work in games where the camerapath is random.

Wrong. As the PDF explained, drivers can detect a TIMEDEMO is running, not just the application as a whole. Then, the drivers can turn off the "cheat" for the real gameplay. The result: the performance in the timedemo does not reflect performance during actual gameplay.

Quote:

Another thing we learn from this is that FutureMark now has also officially stated that their shader routines are inefficient!

Wrong again.

They stated that nVidia's replacements are efficient, and DIFFERENT than their own shaders. They do different but similar things. The bottom line is, nVidia hardware is NOT doing what is asked of it.

Originally posted by saturnotaku
[b]Did you miss the part where FutureMark said the test was altered by ATI drivers?

Yes I noticed it. So? Fact is that it's 1.9% whch is really minor and overall within the margin of error. Whereas the 24% drop with NV is HUGE and in no wa or form within margin of error. Yet large part of people here flame Ati and not NV. I guess they just can't accept the fact that their precious NV was caugh cheating with their pants down.

Quote:

I think this whole thing is only further going to invalidate 3DMark as a reasonable benchmark.

I think this does exactly the opposite. It shows that FM is actively making sure that companies don't cheat on the benchmark.

Now, I know many here dislike 3DMark because NV dislikes it as well. But the fact is that it's not FM that can be blamed for the errors in the benchmark, it has been NV that has done it's best to destroy that benchmark. Instead of telling how worthless 3DMark is, why don't you tell to NV that "Hey! Stop screwing around with 3Dmark!"?

Quote:

You all can sit here and whine about what NVIDIA and ATI did or didn't do. But I'm going to take my cards and use them for what they were intended - to play games. That's all that should ever matter.

Of course, gaming is the thing we use those cards for. Yet benchmarks like 3DMark serve a purpose. And I still find it really funny that 3DMark was A-OK back when NV supported it. Now that they don't, many have started to parrot their stand on the issue. I guess those people blindly believe everything NV spoon-feds.

Quote:

If any card is found to be cheating in games, that's a different matter. But it's 3DMark, and I can't play it so I don't care.

And the fact is that NV CHEATED! Flame 3DMark all you want, fact remains that NV resorted to dishonest methods.

Heh, I just love to watch you folks squirm around this issue . "But but... it's only 3DMark, therefore it doesn't matter if NV cheats! Yeah, that's it.". Like it or not, many OEM's use 3DMark when they are evaluating 3D-cards for their machines, so it IS an important benchmark.

I think this vindicates Futuremark even more. Not only have they caught cheating, they have also implemented code to prevent it.

No, they changed the name of like two variables to prevent it from being detected... the driver detection stuff from every company has to be absurdly specific, or else it might accidentally trigger in a similar application and screw up everything.

It's a shame Futuremark had put some actual scores from the different games rather than just a overall percentage but I am glad they managed to state that some of the cheats were in earlier drivers than 43.51 .. my own figures for GT2 from 42.51 to 42.68 as mentioned in other thread earlier

driver 42.51

GT2
21.2
21.1
21.2
21.1
21.1

GT3
17.7
17.7
17.7
17.7
17.7

42.68
GT2
27.1
27.2
27.1
27.0
27.1

GT3
17.9
17.9
17.9
17.9
17.9

Gt3 stays roughly the same but Gt2 goes up by 28%. So it all happened at least at 42.68's and 42.68 was slated at the time for not drawing GT1 ! Looks like GT1 and Gt3 had cheats in 42.68 and GT4 cheats came out later and were added.

The guy who wrote 42.68 is now a bit of a hero of mine . Probably drives a Porsche, has a tan and a blonde girlfriend and earns twice as much as me. Tosser.